What’s in a Name?: The Growing Focus on Jesus Christ (by Name) since 2000 in General Conference Talks

Our project takes advantage of the LDS General Conference Corpus, a collection of over eleven thousand talks (comprising twenty-five million words) given since 1851. Using this corpus, we tried to decipher any patterns in the use of the appellation Jesus Christ, including twenty-four recognized titles such as Savior, Redeemer, or Lamb of God. We could thus gather the total references to Jesus Christ even if the speaker did not use his proper name. We were careful to also eliminate perfunctory uses of his name—for example, when speakers closed their talks in his full name, or the speaker performed official Church business and therefore used the name of the Church (such as the typical greeting to the “semiannual conference of The Church of . . .”). We did this because we wanted to understand the usage of Jesus Christ’s names and titles as Church leaders taught about him (rather than simply counting talks closed in his name or mentions of the name of the Church).